While it’s not a bad thing to acknowledge and honor the pioneer in our field, James Loud may be on to something if we give too much deference to trailblazers.
Loud wrote an extensive, thought-provoking article in Professional Safety magazine recently, addressing the increasing risk of fatal incidents in work places in th U.S. and Canada. While he was quick to note that much progress has been made in workplace safety to reduce the numbers of incidents overall, he noted also that the numbers of serious incidents have not declined by the same rate as the overall incident rate – which means that when there is an incident, the chance of it leading to serious injury or death is higher than it was four and five decades ago.
How Does This Happen?
Loud theorizes that while it seems surprising and a bit of a conundrum how we got to this point when we’ve been working so hard to improve safety in workplaces, but as you’ll see, Loud traces much of what we do back to three pioneers in safety and how their work still influences much of what is done in safety circles even today.
Frederick Taylor
Frederick Taylor wrote his theories more than 10 years ago, just as the idea of the assembly line was i its infancy. Taylor believed that humans were “lazy” by nature, but could be taught and trained to be quite productive if they were told exactly what to do, how to do it and a very specific time in which to do it.
While there are robots today that do some of the work that humans used to do a century ago, that idea of creating a science from human work through specific steps and detailed training, has existed in different forms a century later, even with differing workplace dynamics. We still see command-and-control safety management, as well as zero-tolerance policies in term of not allowing any deviation from already established protocols. Even the concept of incident investigation as a science and coming to one singular answer is a byproduct of Taylor’s ideas.
B.F. Skinner
Of the three pioneers Loud mentioned in his article, B.F. Skinner is probably the most controversial. While Taylor’s theories were mechanical in nature, attempting to create efficiency trough dictating movements, Skinner went beyond the action and into the behavior of humans.
Skinner wrote much based on his background as a psychologist, saying that humans can have their behaviors conditioned into a level of compliance with what supervisors want. He believed that humans can be taught to do certain behaviors and act a certain way based on positive and negative reinforcements – much like lab experiments with rats who had to learn how to get to food.
Herbert Heinrich
Herbert Heinrich’s theory of the Incident Triangle is more than 80 years old, but even today is still considered by many to be at least somewhat valid and perhaps has the most staying power among these theories.
Heinrich’s theory was based on his research from the 1920s that claimed 88 percent of all incidents came from a result of unsafe actions by workers, 10 percent from unsafe conditions of the worksite and 2 percent where considered true “accidents” that could not have been avoided.
And even as recent as 2012, about 86 percent of safety officers surveyed said that Heinrich’s work is still somewhat or very valid today. His incident triangle theorized that of 330 incidents, 300 of them would not result in injury, 29 would result in some kind of minor injury and one would have major injury or death.
And you know what? It seems that that is how we have approached safety over the last 50 years – the theory has gone that if we reduce the numbers of incidents, then the numbers of minor and major injuries would also go down – the focus was on the percentages of Heinrich’s theory, not as much on the numbers.
Dynamic World, Static Theories
This is the main problem now, Loud claims. The working world is much more dynamic now than it was 50, 60, 100 years ago when Skinner, Heinrich and Taylor did their work. There are much fewer jobs that are rote and routine, as there are fewer assembly-line workers than before thanks to robotics. So it is much harder to train or “condition” workers into doing the same actions all the time, because very few of them have the same actions over and over and over during a shift.
The problem really stems from the fact that while the world has changed, the safety theories that we have tended to rely on have not changed in any discernible way to meet up with the more dynamic workplace of the 21st century.
While much of the work of these three pioneers were groundbreaking in their own right in their own time, we have found ourselves in a difficult spot of applying those theories to much of our safety work. And while it has been effective to a point – that point being the dramatic reduction in the number of incidents overall – it has been wholly inadequate to address the serious incidents that occur.
In other words, it is clear now that taking care of the 88 percent of incidents that are due to unsafe acts, if Heinrich’s theory holds today, does not mean we have addressed the 10 percent of incidents due to unsafe conditions or those that are deemed “unavoidable.” It’s clear with the evolution of safety and the workforce, that safety is really not about the numbers, or the quantity of the incidents; it’s about the quality of them.
All it takes is one to cause a death or a serious injury. In many ways, it’s like terrorists – nations who are trying to protect their people have to be right 100 percent of the time to keep everyone safe; a terrorist only has to be right once to do much damage.
This thought process about quantity over quality has led to four major misconceptions, according to Loud.
And of course, we’ll explore those in the next post.